On the back of Elden Ring's 1.07 update, prolific Souls series dataminers Lance McDonald and Zullie the Witch have shared evidence of potential new DLC areas and ray tracing support being added behind the scenes with the patch.

Zullie (opens in new tab) shared a screenshot of a tier list for Elden Ring, which includes an entry for “m20_00_00_00: ???” As Zullie points out, m10-19 signals the IDs of legacy dungeons like Stormveil Castle (m10_00_00_00), or underground areas like Siofra or Ainsel (which are all preceded by m12). It’s far from certain, but the evidence seems to point to m20 being the designation of a future DLC legacy dungeon.

Zullie also points out another mysterious entry, m45. This doesn't directly correspond to any map files currently in the game, leaving the significance to pure speculation. My best guess is that it would make sense as the ID for a new, separate overworld area to house the legacy DLC dungeon (or dungeons, if FromSoftware has multiple expansions in the works). Alternatively, if m20 covers a large number of areas like the underground ID m12, m45 might make sense as the ID for DLC side dungeons.

Lance McDonald (opens in new tab) Shared extracted menu text related to ray tracing graphics settings. The most important line is “Enabling ray tracing will lock performance settings to prioritize quality. The ray tracing setting will only be applied after returning to the title menu.” The acclaimed lighting technology was always in the cards as a post-launch addition to Elden Ring, but it’s been a long time since release.

Personally, I’ve yet to play a game where ray tracing has paid off in performance, but with Elden Ring still capped at 60fps and still light enough to run on the Steam Deck, this might be where I’d keep it. If FromSoft is still expanding the graphical options for its megahit, I expect it to go even further and implement DLSS and FidelityFX support or even increase the frame rate cap. A guy can dream, can’t he?